February 11, 2007

-ic-y matters

Last Tuesday (2/6/07) I noticed, in the NYT Science Times, the following
(in William K. Stevens, "On the Climate Change Beat, Doubt Gives Way to
Certainty", p. 3):

Politicians are weighing in on the
subject as never before, especially with the advent of a Democratic-led
Congress.

My first reaction was that with "Democratic-led" the paper was bending
over backward in its attempt to avoid things like "the Democrat Party"
for "the Democratic Party" (a Republican practice we've commented on a
number of times on Language Log, most recently here).
And maybe it is. But "Democratic-led" actually beats out
"Democrat-led" by a fair margin, despite the fact that "X-led" 'led by
X(s)' normally requires a noun in the X slot (as do "X-V-ed" 'V-ed by
X' compounds in general). So if this is a formation motivated by
political politeness, there's a lot of politeness going around.

The margin of "Democratic-led" over the expected "Democrat-led" is
185,000 to 104,000, in raw Google webhits, a disparity that will become
more substantial when we remove occurrences of "Democrat-led" from
sources, like Fox News, that avoid "Democratic" systematically.
There are still plenty of hits for "Democrat-led" from sources that are not
generally -ic-less, but
considerably fewer than for "Democratic-led".

A little review of the system here: there are three lexical items
of interest in connection with political parties: the party name Y, in
"Y Party"; the noun denoting an adherent or member of the Y Party; and
the related adjective Z, used in expressions like "Z policies".
To keep things simple, I'll restrict myself to party names that are
either nouns or adjectives (or ambiguous between the two). There
are three main systems:

Now, "X-led" wants a noun X (as in "Pelosi-led", "Gingrich-led",
"Bush-led", and many others), which it gets from the party name if
that's a noun, otherwise from the adherent noun (that is, it uses the
more basic noun of the two that are available): "Labour-led",
"Democrat-led", "Republican-led". "Labourite-led" would be
possible in the sense 'led by Labourites', but in fact I get no hits at
all for it (or for "Labourite-dominated" or "Labourite-ruled").

The use of polite -ic (if
that's what it is) extends to other compounds: "Democratic-dominated"
alongside "Democrat-dominated"; "Democratic-ruled" alongside
"Democrat-ruled", etc. There are probably interesting patterns to
be discovered here, but for now it's enough for me to point out that
political concerns seem to have led to an exception to an otherwise
firm generalization about English morphology.